I am a Operation:Flashpoint fanatic, but I started playing Call of Duty recently. The style of battle between the two games is vastly different. CoD has more heated battles, with lots of stationary machineguns aiming at you, and soldiers coming from all directions. OFP on the other hand, has slower, more tactical battles with fewer soldiers involved. Which style of battle is more close to reality? O:FP or CoD?
Can’t tell you personally; but, John Keegan wrote a book on exactly that question. It’s called The Face of Battle. Hope that helps.
As far as numbers of troops involved or the directional component of the enemy’s assault, you can get almost anything. A patrol doing house-clearing operations in Tikrit might get ambushed by two or three groups of individuals from different directions; a squad trying to hold a point on a defensive perimeter (for a comms post) might have to only worry about their front, and might defend it with stationary guns. A platoon involved in the D-Day assault would have an altogether different idea of what “a battle” is like than the same platoon would at the Bulge, and neither of them would compare to the armored sprint up the Tigris from the most recent Iraq War.
Soldiers describe the passage of time in battles very differently, too, so your perception of “fast” and “slow” behind a terminal may be radically different from the perception of someone who is inching into a firing position from cover.